Comments on: Victory Records halts manufacturing of promotional CDs. Who’s next?

By: buzzR

buzzR — Sun, 25 May 2008 07:39:04 +0000

Cheers to all, just a question, if you should have to use this digi-music for reviews, which system of the two mentioned is the best, or are they both the same? How about sound quality. is it at all passable? Obviously the speakers , and sound card capabilities factor in to the quality…am I right? Any thoughts?

By: Erik Thomas

Erik Thomas — Thu, 01 May 2008 14:46:25 +0000

Apparently-Earache is next to be done with promos

By: Erik Thomas

Erik Thomas — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:34:05 +0000

Are you having a dig at me Chris? :)

By: Chris Dick

Chris Dick — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 18:04:39 +0000

You haven’t read Erik T’s reviews then?

By: Tom Jonze

Tom Jonze — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:33:53 +0000

Ultimately guys (and girls) this will have almost 0 affect on your website as TOTD (ex-digitalmetal) reviews like 3 victory albums a year positively. they are doing themselves a favor by preventing bad reviews. well-deserved bad reviews i might add.
victory had dropped some great hardcore albums early in their career but they have been on a constant, agonizingly too slow, downward spiral into bankruptcy.
good riddance to their promos …. next up, the label!

By: Fred Phillips

Fred Phillips — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 01:30:28 +0000

Sucks. My payment for most of the reviews that I write is the free CD. With the voiceover CDs and CDs split into 99 tracks that I’ve been getting for the past few years has certainly made me less enthusiastic, and now this? No thanks. Most of my reviews are written in my truck on the way to and from work. It’s the only place I really have to listen to music without interruption. A high-quality MP3 download, you might get me to consider, but I’m never going to be able to sit in front of my computer and listen to a crappy stream. It provides me no incentive at all to review the release.

Reminds me of a major label a few years back that asked me to do a story and review on one of their bands that was coming through. I already didn’t like the band, but then they sent me a watermarked, copy-protected CD that would not play in my truck, my computer or my home entertainment system. At the time, those were the only three CD players that were available to me. I packed it up and sent it back with a note explaining that I didn’t want the responsibility of somebody possibly pulling the watermarked CD out of the trash where I was about to throw it, and could they please take it back. Probably burned myself forever with that company, but oh well … didn’t like any of their bands anyway.

By: AVERSIONLINE

AVERSIONLINE — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:58:22 +0000

I think this is a TERRIBLE idea. I’ve only had one label contact me so far offering streams for review instead of CD’s, and I told them I wouldn’t do it. For years I INSISTED on having complete packaging, but now that I have an iPod I finally understand and “get it” why so many people never cared about that aspect of it to some degree. So I’ll actually write about high-quality mp3’s nowadays, but streams? Fuck that. Not only is it insulting because of the sound quality, but because they’re expecting someone to – like you said – “sit, tied to a computer, for 30-50 minutes to stream an album”. Ridiculous. What incentive is there for a reviewer to spend their time covering an album if they don’t even GET THE MUSIC to keep for themselves!?

I totally understand that full album mp3 blogs are a big problem, but that’s not going to stop over this, and a lot of those bands/labels that care could be doing a lot more to police that with simple Google blog searches and emails to the site owners asking for the content to be removed. A ton of blogspot blogs have been getting shut down in recent weeks for giving away full albums.